Wine has played a positive role in maintaining human health by providing a sanitary source of water, through its psychoactive effects on the state of one's mind and by providing a reliable source of calories. In the early 1970's, the scientific and medical communities began taking an interest in the human health benefits of antioxidants including polyphenols. In 2003, trans-resveratrol was brought to the public's attention once it was reported that trans-resveratrol had life-extending properties. Concurrently it was advertised that trans-resveratrol is abundantly available in red wines as a result of the anti-oxidant being present in the skins of red grapes.
With the intense interest in the health benefits of resveratrol by the scientific and medical communities has come a concurrent interest in the free market promotion of these proposed benefits. A 2008 study of the red wine market in Spain demonstrated that consumers were willing to pay a higher price for a resveratrol enhanced red wine than for its non-enhanced counterpart. Since then, many attempts have been made to enhance or add resveratrol to food and beverages to provide its health benefits.
There have been many forms of resveratrol enhanced products introduced to the market, but none provide for the resveratrol to be bioavailable for appropriate absorption by the human body, thus the “enhanced” qualities of the food or beverage becomes digested without being absorbed by the human body. Instead of being absorbed, the resveratrol additive is digested and eventually expelled from the body without significant absorption, thus making the enhancement of the food or beverage non-effective. Typically, resveratrol enhanced products simply include an amount of resveratrol powder being added to the normal ingredients of the food or beverage since the resveratrol powder adds very little to no flavor.
Currently, the common form of bioavailable resveratrol available to the consumer is provided from drinking red wine. It should be appreciated that merely ingesting an amount of resveratrol, whether in raw powder form, pill form, or as a suspended solid immixed within a liquid provides no known bioavailability, thus the ingested resveratrol is digested and excreted without being available to the cells of the body. In fact, recent studies (Walle et al, Drug Metabolism and Disposition Vol 32, No. 12, pgs. 1377-1382 Jun. 7, 2004) have provided that “all attempts to find measurable levels of Resveratrol in plasma after the oral dose at any time point in patients failed.” In oral dose scenarios, the free resveratrol essentially never makes it into the bloodstream.
A number of attempts have been made to provide for resveratrol-enhanced beverages, however, many teach simply adding an amount of resveratrol powder to a beverage. These attempts fail to provide a resveratrol enhanced beverage because the resveratrol added is not bioavailable, rather it only becomes a suspended solid forming an aqueous solution, and becomes digested and excreted from the body without being absorbed by the body.
Thus, there remains an unmet need at providing a resveratrol enhanced food, beverage, cosmetic or drug product that provides for a bioavailable amount of resveratrol to provide the homeopathic and anti-oxidative benefits of resveratrol. There further remains an unmet need at providing an effective resveratrol enhanced food, beverage, cosmetic or drug product that provides a bioavailable amount of resveratrol while maintaining the alcohol by volume (ABV) of the enhanced food, beverage, cosmetic or drug product below any regulatory standards for required reporting.